IN BRIEF:

Eye for adversity

Lead review

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Jun 17 2017, 21:57pm ist

updated: Jun 17 2017, 23:58pm ist

In The God of Small Things, her stunning debut novel, published 20 years ago, Arundhati Roy wrote that in India, ‘personal despair could never be desperate enough’ because ‘worse things had happened’ and would keep happening. The barbarities of history: the bloody politics of colonialism and partition, shockingly violent outbreaks of religious strife, paralysing caste and class prejudices, and what V S Naipaul once called ‘poverty and an abjectness too fearful to imagine’.

In that earlier novel, Roy focused on personal and private losses, using her magical eye for emotional detail and her quicksilver prose to immerse us in the daily rhythms of life in a Kerala village, while creating a Faulknerian portrait of a family that had the inevitability of a classic tragedy. Her long-awaited new novel, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, has moments of similar heartfelt intensity, but it is less focused on the personal and the private than on ‘the vast, violent, circling, driving, ridiculous, insane, unfeasible, public turmoil of a nation’.

This makes for an ambitious but highly discursive novel that eventually builds to a moving conclusion but bogs down, badly, in the middle, and is sometimes so lacking in centripetal force that it threatens to fly apart into pieces. As Roy describes one preoccupied character’s writing habits: ‘She wrote strange things down. She collected scraps of stories and inexplicable memorabilia that appeared to have no purpose. There seemed to be no pattern or theme to her interest’.

No doubt Roy, who has spent much of the last two decades immersed in politics (she became a vocal supporter of the Kashmiri separatist movement, and a critic of Hindu nationalism), means for the many fragments and digressions to open out her story into a panoramic mosaic of modern India, and the countless social, political, religious and cultural issues roiling just below the surface of everyday life. There are references to national tragedies in the unending ‘supermarket of sorrow’, like the Bhopal toxic gas disaster of 1984 and the Gujarat riots of 2002, and a multiplication of alarming anecdotes involving murder, rape, torture and mutilation, as well as more mundane episodes of loss and grief.

These horrifying incidents, and Roy’s introduction of myriad minor characters, however, do not result in a Bruegel-esque portrait of a country but instead feel like poorly stage-managed detours from the compelling stories of Roy’s two heroines: the transgender woman Anjum (born Aftab), who’s gone to live in a Delhi graveyard; and Tilo, a former architecture student, who travels to Kashmir to visit her longtime friend and sometime lover Musa, a freedom fighter, who is in constant danger and constantly on the run.

Anjum’s divided soul and Tilo’s complicated romantic life seem meant as metaphors of sorts for the subcontinent’s own divisions over history and religion, but Ministry never becomes a transporting parable about modern India the way that, say, Salman Rushdie’s dazzling Midnight’s Children did. Roy’s gift is not for the epic but for the personal, as The God of Small Things so powerfully demonstrated. Clearly, the intervening years of writing often didactic non-fiction — on subjects like nuclear tests, political corruption and Hindu extremism — have not damaged her gift for poetic description or her ability to map the complicated arithmetic of love and belonging.

Roy effortlessly captures the love Anjum feels for an abandoned child named Zainab, whom she adopts as a daughter; and the friendship she develops with a young man who calls himself Saddam Hussain and who also takes up residence in the graveyard. Roy’s depiction of Tilo and Musa’s furtive romance in Kashmir has a cinematic quality — a reminder of her work as a screenwriter — as well as a genuine poignancy and depth of emotion.

It’s when Roy turns from the specifics of her characters’ lives and tries to generalise about the plight of India that her writing can grow laboured and portentous: ‘Normality in our part of the world is a bit like a boiled egg: its humdrum surface conceals at its heart a yolk of egregious violence. It is our constant anxiety about that violence, our memory of its past labours and our dread of its future manifestations, that lays down the rules for how a people as complex and as diverse as we continue to coexist — continue to live together, tolerate each other and, from time to time, murder one another.” Happily for the reader who perseveres through such strained passages, Roy weaves the stories of Tilo and Anjum together in the novel’s musical and beautifully orchestrated conclusion — an ending that manages to extract hope from the copious tragedies these people have witnessed, a glimpse of the future in lives so burdened by the past.

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